All 3rd – 5th graders are invited to the TV Time vs. Reading Challenge. From Friday night, October 18th – through Sunday night October 20th, students were asked to keep track of their TV viewing time. Each student was asked to read for at least the same amount of time as they spend watching TV. If they spend more time reading than watching TV – even by 5 minutes – Mrs. Bradshaw will walk 1 lap around a high school track. Mrs. Bradshaw is hoping to walk many many miles!
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Anderson, Fielding, and Wilson (1988) compared the amount of student reading with their scores on achievement tests. The number of minutes spent in out-of-school reading, even if it was a small amount, correlated positively with reading achievement. The more students read outside of school the higher they scored on reading achievement tests. Students who scored at the 90th percentile on a reading test spent five times as many minutes as children at the 50th percentile, and more than 200 times as many minutes per day reading books as the child at the 10th percentile. The researchers conclude that “among all the ways children spent their time, reading books was the best predictor of measures of reading achievement reading comprehension, vocabulary, and reading speed, including gains in reading comprehension between second and fifth grade”
